'Call Corporate Of Apple and tell them to stop there persuit!!'

Quotw This was the week when the Oracle v Google trial over the Chocolate Factory's use of Java in the Android OS rumbled on, and the jury didn't help matters much.

The jury started deliberations last week, but were stuck by the weekend, though Judge William Alsup encouraged them to keep trying:

If there is hope for reaching a verdict on all the questions, we should take advantage of that hope and spend one more day deliberating. So what I'm going to ask you to do is do exactly that.

However, his hopes were short-lived. The jury was able to come back with a ruling that Google did infringe on Oracle's copyright with the use of 37 APIs in Android, including nine lines of software code in the rangeCheck function used in Android, but it couldn't decide if the web giant had been using the stuff fairly or not.

We appreciate the jury's efforts, and know that fair use and infringement are two sides of the same coin. The core issue is whether the APIs here are copyrightable, and that's for the court to decide. We expect to prevail on this issue and Oracle's other claims.

But of course that's not the only fun going on in the courts this week. Apple has filed a complaint against some of its very own fanbois, who own and use a site called iphone5.com.

The fruity firm took objection and went moaning to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), which did not sit well with the site's visitors.

One of the forum's 446 members said:

Call Corporate Of Apple and tell them to stop there persuit!! Blow up there phones, Spam there emails, call there Administration! Do something to get our point across. [verbatim quote]

However, some of his fellow forum members don't seem to think it's too likely that anyone will be able to stop the Corporate of Apple:

I have been through a WIPO case with a large company and I can tell you for sure, you don't have a chance. It will take a little while to go through the process, but this domain will be transferred to Apple.

And in some better court-related news, a US judge has criticised IP addresses as a method of identifying people misbehaving online.

In a case where a porn company is attempting a suit against internet subscribers for downloading smutty movies through BitTorrent, Judge Gary Brown questioned the idea that an IP address automatically fingered the crook:

It is no more likely that the subscriber to an IP address carried out a particular computer function – here the purported illegal downloading of a single pornographic film – than to say an individual who pays the telephone bill made a specific telephone call... The alleged infringer could be the subscriber, a member of his or her family, an employee, invitee, neighbour or interloper.

However, he is still allowing some of the plaintiffs to obtain the name, address, and Media Access Control address of defendants and said ISPs should hand over any relevant information.

In the UK, hacktivist group Anonymous was getting its revenge for another court order – the one forcing ISPs to block The Pirate Bay.

The hacktivist network claimed the credit for a DDoS attack on Virgin Media's website on its Twitter feed:

Anonymous have just taken down Virgin Media website again because of their involvement in the censorship of The Pirate Bay.

Virgin Media said the hack didn't last long:

Our website, virginmedia.com, has been the subject of denial of service attacks so we took the site offline for a short period of time. We're aware some groups are claiming the attacks are a result of the recent High Court order which requires ISPs to prevent access to The Pirate Bay.

And also more or less said it would prefer not to have block The Pirate Bay, but it would do what it was told:

As a responsible ISP, Virgin Media complies with court orders but we strongly believe that tackling the issue of copyright infringement needs compelling legal alternatives, giving consumers access to great content at the right price, to help change consumer behaviour.

In science, the search for the new chip architecture and the search for something cool to do with graphene in tech are coinciding happily in a project to construct a functioning magnetologic gate that will be the building block and become the main element of a circuit.

The physics and astronomy professor behind the project, Roland Kawakami of the University of California, said:

We are in a crawling phase [now]. It’s similar to back 50 years ago, when they invented the transistor and they needed that one device. That's the same for us.

I've learned talking to engineers: there are more issues that come up that I hadn’t thought about. But at the level of can we make a gate, make it operate and operate well – definitely, we can do that. ®